New Releases by Stephanie Bolster

After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster's fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through us.

The poems of Stephanie Bolster’s second collection move with delicacy and power, whether focussing on a flock of snow geese on a flooded plain, on the paintings of Jean Paul Lemieux, or on two wasps in a Pepsi can on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These intimate acts of language create a space infused with stillness and an edgy expectation. Here is a poetry of engagement and mystery, in which truth is found in seepage and reversal: the bowls of milk the colour of milk; the two facing human profiles forming between them the shape of a vase. This volume sketches a clear, unwavering arc through poems sometimes raw and painful, but always exquisite, and, ultimately, transformative. Two Bowls of Milk confirms Stephanie Bolster as one of the most gifted new poets in Canada today.

The poems in Stephanie Bolster’s new collection create longings, reveries, and meditations that, though powerfully presented to us, evade the reduction of named emotion. It takes a special subtlety of writing, a delicate handling of image and judgement of details to make what is offstage resonate with such eloquence. This collection reveals Stephanie Bolster writing at the extreme of her craft to bring us a poetry of extraordinary refinement.

A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth is a book with a coherent vision of nature -- constructed or framed, both in the present and in the recent past -- through zoos, aviaries, formal gardens, menageries, and books like the Time-Life one named in the title. Informed by the author's grand tour of these zoos and gardens, these poems provide a strong lens for considering the many paradoxes of inter-species relations; they open up the possibility of honest, unsentimental elegy. The book is also a model of what might be called investigative poetry, taking the poet's combination of perceptual acuity, craft, music and sensibility into these richly troubled places (prisons of, monuments to, museums for the lost natural world) where "arcades sell postcards of old photographs of the arcades," and where questions of what it means to be human, to be animal, to be other and to be art are tangibly in the air. This is Bolster's best work

Le Groupe des huit, s'il ne constitue pas un regroupement de poètes comme tel, représente néanmoins des aspects pertinents de la poésie anglo-québécoise actuelle. Judith-Louise Thibault a imaginé ce titre pour rendre compte d'un certain esprit et rendre hommage à ces poètes. Le choix est subjectif, bien entendu; il a le mérite de nous familiariser à des univers poétiques aux articulations certes différentes de la poésie qui s'écrit en français, mais que nous pouvons reconnaître, tant il est vrai que le poème parle dans toutes les langues et qu'il est porté par une exigence tout à fait similaire. "Nous nous comprenons parfaitement", malgré la frontière de la langue, parce que nous parlons une langue commune, "la langue de la poésie", ainsi que le dit Gaston Miron à David Solway. Le livre est né de l'amitié de l'anthologiste avec les poètes David Solway et Peter van Toorn ainsi que d'une longue fréquentation des poèmes. Toutes ces voix recherchent leur singularité et leur autonomie. Elles partagent une exigence commune pour la quête d'un langage. Nous souhaitons que le lecteur soit conduit par l'amour des poèmes pour en découvrir davantage sur les poètes réunis dans cet ouvrage, contribuant ainsi à une meilleure connaissance de la poésie anglo-québécoise.

These evocative poems move from the icon of Alice in Wonderland to the imagined figure of Alice out of Wonderland: on a Vancouver beach with the poet, underground with Persephone, in Memphis with Elvis. But first they explore the life of the real Alice Liddell (1852-1934), who sat still for Charles Dodgson's camera and inspired the Alice books which prompted his rise to fame as Lewis Carroll. The publication of White Stone in 1998 coincides with the centenary of Lewis Carroll's death.